Episode 284: Jennifer G. Bird - The Myth of Biblical Marriage
Should Christians use the Bible as a template for a healthy marriage? In this episode of The Bible for Normal People, Jennifer G. Bird joins Jared and Angela Parker to bust the myth of “biblical” marriage. She dives into the ways scripture has been used to enforce traditional gender roles, the cultural assumptions embedded in biblical texts about marriage, sex, and property rights, and how these interpretations have influenced Christian thought. Join them as they explore the following questions:
What does the term "biblical marriage" refer to, and what assumptions are made about it?
How does the New Testament focus on marriage and the sexual aspect of relationships, especially in passages like 1 Corinthians 7?
How do Genesis 1:28 and 2:24 inform the concept of marriage in the Bible?
How did the ancient understanding of sex and marriage affect the role of women and their bodies in biblical times?
What does it mean when the Bible speaks of men taking women in marriage, and how does this reflect on gender roles?
Why do the laws in Leviticus 18 and 20 focus so much on whom men can or cannot have sex with, and how does that relate to marriage?
What is the distinction between "man and woman" versus "husband and wife" in the Hebrew Bible, and how does it shape our understanding of biblical relationships?
How has the biblical notion of property rights impacted modern ideas about submissive wives and abusive relationships?
What are the challenges of reconciling ancient views of marriage with contemporary faith practices?
Quotables
Pithy, shareable, sometimes-less-than-280-character statements from the episode you can share.
“Biblically speaking, a man takes a woman, he has sex with her to mark her as his property, and whether or not they learn to love each other is just kind of…who knows?” @JenniferGBird@theb4np
“We don't have an example of a married couple in the Bible [in which] two people enter into it, both choosing it as equals or based on love. I love that that's an ideal that many people try to live up to, and that's how they see their commitment. That's not biblical.” @JenniferGBird@theb4np
“When I step back and look at chapter one of Genesis, I see a story about creation. I see a story about being human, but I don't see the people trying to write a story about one particular human relationship that we, today, happen to call marriage.” @JenniferGBird@theb4np
“Even in the newer testament, when we get to Jesus and Paul, their claims and their commentary around marriage are still putting sex in the forefront. They don't ever talk about marriage, the marriage relationship, through any other lens.” @JenniferGBird@theb4np
“Many people like to look at 1 Corinthians 7, Paul's comments about marrying or staying single, and/or remarrying if you're a widow, and all the different options that he delineates in that chapter. Which is kind of fascinating in and of itself, but every single bit in that chapter is around sex.” @JenniferGBird@theb4np
“It kind of blew my mind when I realized that if we take the whole collection, these two primary testaments at least, they teach people to focus on the sex act when it comes to thinking about marriage.”@JenniferGBird@theb4np
“In the case of Jesus and Paul, I think they were just very well informed by their Hebrew Bible scriptures. And so they are reflecting back in those writings, or in the Gospels, what we should expect—which is to think about that relationship through the lens of: pairing up is predominantly about sex and having children.” @JenniferGBird@theb4np
“In the Hebrew Bible, there aren't two different nouns to differentiate between woman and wife. It's just woman. It's just ishah. And the same is true of man. It's 'Ish, and that is translated as either man or husband. But it's the same noun. And the same is true in the newer testament. We have aner and gune. [The Bible doesn’t] have a separate way to refer to humans before being paired up, and then after, the way we do today.” @JenniferGBird@theb4np
“If we just remove husband and wife language entirely from the Christian Bible and replace it with man and woman, how would that change things for you?”
Mentioned in This Episode
Class: October class “Get a Grip on the Gospels” taught by Dr. Jennifer Garcia Bashaw
Books: Marriage in the Bible: What Do the Texts Say? By Jennifer G. Bird
Join: The Society of Normal People community
Support: www.thebiblefornormalpeople.com/give
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Pete: You're listening to the Bible for Normal People, the only God ordained podcast on the internet. I'm Pete Enns.
Jared: And I'm Jared Byas.
[Intro music plays]
Pete: This is just a friendly reminder that even though the Pay What You Can window has ended, you can still get our awesome October class, “Get a Grip on the Gospels: Reading the Gospels Well” for $25 and watch it right now. Yes, right this very moment.
Jared: In this second installment of our three-part series on the New Testament, Dr. Jennifer Garcia Bashaw will guide you through the larger political, societal, and religious context that shaped the Gospels; Gospel as genre; tools and methods scholars use to read the New Testament; and more.
Pete: The class is pre-recorded which means you get instant access to watch it, and it even comes with a study guide so you can follow along. There will also be a live Q&A with Jennifer on November 20th at 8pm ET so she can answer all your questions about the New Testament.
Jared: And of course, if you want access to this class and all of our other classes—plus ad-free podcast episodes, Bible scholar Q&As, a great community, and more—you can become a member of our online community the Society of Normal People for as little as $12/month. For more info and to purchase our October class, head to thebiblefornormalpeople.com/Fall24. That’s thebiblefornormalpeople.com / fall 2-4.
Jared: Welcome everyone! On today's episode, I'm back with the lovely nerd in residence, Angela Parker, and we're talking about biblical marriage with Jennifer Bird. And Dr. Jennifer Bird received her PhD from Vanderbilt University and has more than 25 years of teaching in classrooms of all kinds.
Angela: Her favorite conversations include gender, sexuality, and marriage, what the Bible does and does not say about them, which is perfect because that's exactly what we're going to talk about today. Okay, let's get into the episode.
[Teaser clip of Jennifer speaking plays over music]
Jennifer G. Bird: “Biblically speaking, a man takes a woman, he has sex with her to mark her as his property, and whether or not they learn to love each other is just kind of who knows? We don't have an example of a married couple in the Bible that these two people enter into it, both choosing it as equals or based on love. I love that that's an ideal that many people try to live up to, and that's how they see their commitment. That's not biblical.”
[Ad break]
Jared: Alright, well, welcome, Jennifer, to the podcast. It's great to have you. I'm really looking forward to this conversation.
Jennifer G. Bird: Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure.
Jared: Absolutely. All right. Well, let's, let's dive right in because we're going to talk about biblical marriage. This is a phrase we hear a lot, whether we like it or not, or whether we agree with it or not. We hear this phrase, you know, batted around in circles that we tend to run in. The idea of “biblical marriage.”
So, I want to kind of go back to the beginning, back to Genesis, because a lot of this rests on a couple of passages, really. So, can you maybe walk us through these passages and the assumptions people make, and maybe we can try to unpack the idea of biblical marriage and what are those assumptions? What are we talking about? Maybe bring us up to speed because some people maybe don't even know what we're talking about when we talk about “biblical marriage” in air quotes.
Jennifer G. Bird: Exactly. So, I'll just throw this out there as a starting point. I had a conversation with someone I knew from seminary and he was the first person to elaborate for me, “Well these are the passages that I think of or that I'm referring to when I use the phrase biblical marriage.” He’s from a very conservative Presbyterian tradition, so I appreciated him delineating them for me, so just very briefly, and then I'll jump into kind of unpacking, especially those first two.
Usually, the passages that someone is assuming is underlying or is informing biblical marriage would be the following verses: Genesis chapter 1 verse 28, just that verse; Genesis chapter 2 verse 24, again, just that verse; Matthew 19, verses 4 to 6, which fall in the middle of, or not quite the beginning of, an exchange between Jesus and some Pharisees; and then Ephesians 5, just verses 31 and 32. Those are the passages.
So, let's look, okay, let's go back to Genesis 1 and Genesis 2. And I will say that something that I think is helpful for people to know is that these two verses were being taken up by rabbis within a couple hundred years, or at least a couple hundred years, I should say, before Jesus hits the scene.
So, anything we see people doing with this concept of marriage in the newer testament is going to be informed by this longstanding deliberation or conversation that's already been taking place. So I think that's important to note up front. So Genesis 1:28 is the verse that talks about, you know, God talks to the people and says, be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it, so forth and so on.
And so when I hear someone refer to Genesis 1:28, I usually take them to mean that they're thinking of the reproductive element of sex, that having children, reproducing is a part of, and I'm using air quotes here, Jared, “God's intention for marriage.” And so this idea then, I was going to say subtly, but it's more like unconsciously and quite powerfully, informs or kind of fills in this image of children are only intended for marriage and children are an expectation for people who are married.
And, you know, there's so many pieces, kind of layers to what I've just said, that okay, that sounds nice on one level on one hand, but on another level, when you look at the realities couples go through, or maybe struggle with, that even making the assertion that children are expected, that in and of itself can be quite harmful for people.
What does that say for people who choose not to have children intentionally? How does that affect people who struggle and aren't able to? Brings up all kinds of questions about when you believe that God is intervening in each woman's uterus, you know, it brings up some really interesting questions. But what I also think is helpful, when I started studying this topic for the purpose of kind of talking about it in a public setting, one of the things I enjoyed realizing, because I hadn't sat with some of these passages this way before, was that Genesis 1 in general isn't really trying to talk about one particular human relationship, right?
If you look at what chapter 1 of Genesis is doing, it's walking through day by day, you know, kind of the creation of the planet, if you will, right? And it's really kind of cool to, you know, it's a lovely narrative and it's beautiful and God seems to be fairly creative or whatever, and all these things are being spoken into being, right?
And, you know, God tells the fish of the sea to be fruitful and multiply, right? And then on the next day, God tells the land animals and the humans to be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth, right? So that's just a part of the picture of being on the planet is, first of all, beings do reproduce, none of the beings needed to be told by a God in the heavens, you need to get busy multiplying right, whether it's plants or animals or humans, like, we kind of already have that thing going on, you know, we don't actually need the command to do it.
So, but people tend to take as an imperative or a command, I think, is better understood through the lens of kind of affirming, you know, what it is like to be a part of the planet, what it is like to be on this, in the world. So I think that there's, you know, when you look at God telling other creatures to also be fruitful and multiply, that isn't going hand in hand with an implied idea that those creatures are married, right?
And so what I, what I was startled to realize for myself was that I was imposing on Genesis 1:28 the belief that these humans were going to be married because they're going to be having sex and procreating. Like, I have grown up in a culture and in a faith tradition that had trained me so well to think about those two things as inseparable, like they have to go together, having children and being married. And it was almost embarrassing for me when I realized that, that I was bringing that much of my own presupposition to that verse, that one verse.
When I step back and look at chapter one of Genesis, I see a story about creation. I see a story about being human, but I don't see the people trying to write a story about one particular human relationship that we, today, happen to call marriage. Right? Do you see that? Does that distinction make sense?
Jared: Yeah. Yeah. I want to maybe just restate it and say what I hear you saying is for a lot of people in certain traditions, it's very easy to read back into it, and it sort of is a circular argument, when we read back into it, that because there is this idea of procreation and it presumes sex, and then we lay on to that our own tradition that says you can only do that if you're married, therefore they must have been married in this text, we're already presupposing the conclusion we're trying to prove in the very argument we're making.
Jennifer G. Bird: That's right. And so that keeps many people, I, I will say, because I know that this is true of a lot of people I interact with, from being able to see what's just going on, which is, it's just a, an affirmation, right? Of sorts, you know, and I think that this conversation in general needs to go hand in hand with talking honestly about what we should actually expect from the Bible, right?
So, the issue of genres and all of that plays into this conversation. So being able to see this as a story, what is it talking about? And maybe kind of letting go of the idea that God is saying children are part of marriage and you can only have children and, you know, like all the pieces that you just noted, Jared, that we typically bring to it and just let it be what it's talking about, right?
But, you know, and playfully, as I'm sure the two of you have done in your own spheres as well, I think it's also helpful to look at the next verse as a way to highlight that we might be misunderstanding or mistaking what that story is about. Because the next verse, Genesis 1:28, says that all humans and animals are to be vegan, right?
So the food that's available is just vegetation, you know. And the same is true in Genesis 2, but what is it that people are being told to focus on and hold on to, you know, as something universal as compared to seeing it as part of this narrative, you know, that's doing something lovely. It's just a different feel from my perspective to read it that way.
Angela: Yes. Can I ask a question, Jennifer?
Jennifer G. Bird: Of course.
Angela: At the beginning of your answer, you said the Newer Testament. [Jennifer chuckles] And I know that a lot of our listeners will probably have heard that and said, huh? Can you quickly unpack that for our listeners?
Jennifer G. Bird: Sure. Yeah. My short answer is, I refer to the Old Testament and New Testament as the Hebrew Bible and the newer Testament, I guess, like you said, let's make this brief. Those are my, my ways of handling those two collections that are sacred for people. But that first collection, the Old Testament is not just for Christians. And so I prefer Hebrew Bible to any of the other possibilities out there as a way to honor, right, that it's Jewish in origin.
It's in a different order for Jews, but it's a collection that stands on its own and doesn't need a second part. And for me to choose in a similar vein, to choose to call the New Testament the Newer, for me that's a way of honoring, again, that it is newer than this other collection that it is paired with for Christians, but it doesn't replace it because even though people, you know, it doesn't replace the First Testament because Christian tradition requires the Hebrew Bible to make sense.
And saying newer, to me invites this reality that it is an ongoing conversation even though the canon itself is closed, people are still deliberating over how to interpret it, and I would say are finding more and more responsible ways to engage it than some of our church fathers did, for instance. So—
Angela: Thank you. Now, can I ask a follow up question to your brilliant delineation on some of these texts? When we think about marriage and sex and how we've almost overlapped them within the biblical text, what has that done to women's roles and the importance of women's uteruses as we've begun to read other parts of the biblical text?
Jennifer G. Bird: You just got off on a whole other conversation that's so important. I love it! And I'm like, “Oh my gosh, how much time do we have?” [Jennifer and Angela laugh] Because one of the things that, again, I kind of hadn't sat with before I started doing the research around this book and prior to this book was that when we talk about marriage in the Bible, especially in the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible, we're talking about sex.
Like if you go look at when they talk about a couple coming together, you know, a man going out and purchasing a woman, Jacob going out and working 14 years to purchase two sisters, right? They talk about them coming together and they have sex and that, it's a done deal. And then they get busy having babies. Like we're talking about sex. It is forefront in these relationships. That's all they talk about.
We don't see references to Jacob and Rachel, having daily life experiences, or working out problems, or respecting each other, or listening well, or any of that stuff, right? And sure, it's kind of what we should expect for an ancient text. That wasn't their interest, right? I don't think they were trying to talk about family life. They were trying to do something bigger, and I get that. But the flip side is, all the examples we have, the legislation around marriage, which I talk about in Matriarchs, Patriarchs, Laws, and Adultery chapter, like all these other elements of the writings in the Christian Bible are also only focused on women as property and women being needed in this pairing up that we call marriage, and that sex is central or forefront in the way it's being talked about and why her body needs to be pure upfront, you know, and why that doesn't apply to men. It's not said directly. It's very strongly implied in lots of legislation.
But even in the newer Testament, when we get to Jesus and Paul, we have their claims and their commentary around marriage are still putting sex in the forefront. They don't ever talk about marriage, the marriage relationship, through any other lens. Many people like to look at, 1 Corinthians 7, Paul's comments about marrying or staying single and or remarrying if you're a widow and all the different options that he delineates in that chapter, which is kind of fascinating in and of itself, but every single bit in that chapter is around sex, right?
Whether “Well, if you can't squelch your own passion, then it's better to get married, that'll help you put out your passion. If you're a widow, it's better if you remain unmarried as I am, but if you can't handle it, get married,” you know, like the focus is still around the sex act in some way.
You know, when we can look at Matthew 19, the passage that is often pulled out and read or talked about in this conversation, it's about for which reason, you know, Jesus, are we allowed to divorce? And, and it, it's very short, and it doesn't take into consideration the whole exchange there, which is really important in my opinion. But what Jesus is recorded or having, is being attributed with saying in that exchange, is that he is affirming that we really shouldn't divorce, but the reason we shouldn't divorce and this is the piece that's left out when you don't look at the whole passage and was surprising to me, again, to sit with and to realize, is that even Jesus is saying the reason a divorce is a problem is because you all are going to go get married and have sex with someone else.
Divorce isn't a problem because it wrenches families apart, because it makes it hard for all these people to survive on their own, or to support two households, or you were bonded with these family members, and you just, you lose them, and think about how it affects the children, and…no, none of the things that are really important today, none of those things are on the table. The issue is around monitoring people's bodies and sexual activity.
So it kind of blew my mind when I realized that, that the scriptures for Christians, because if we take the whole collection, these two primary testaments at least, they teach people to focus on the sex act when it comes to thinking about marriage, and in our context today, and thus who we're going to, air quotes, allow to get married. The traditions themselves teach people to focus on the sex component of marriage.
Right? So your question, Angela, was really important. I mean, you just kind of jumped into the heart of it, I think, because people are being trained to think of it in one way that isn't healthy. And certainly sex is a lovely thing most of the time, or whatever, and I think it's great, and it's a part of pairing up because of the nature of these scriptures and what they were trying to do at the time, or in the case of Jesus and Paul, I think they were just very well informed by their Hebrew Bible scriptures.
And so they are reflecting back in those writings or in the Gospels, what we should expect, which is to think about that relationship through the lens of: pairing up is predominantly about sex and having children.
Jared: That's a really helpful deep dive into that broader concept of how the Bible portrays sex and marriage and how they are interlinked in a way that maybe we wouldn't today. But can we go, because I want to take that, I want to go back to Genesis 2, that passage that talks about a man leaving his father and mother being united to his wife and they become one flesh.
And I say it that way because that's what the NIV says, but I want, can you maybe take that passage and talk a little bit? Cause I think it's connected, but I think it also gets more specific in this instance.
Jennifer G. Bird: You're right. It is. It's, it's, again, this was a passage that the first time I really sat with it for myself, not trying to look to see anything in particular, but just sat with the implications of what I was seeing in the Hebrew versus what I saw in every single English translation.
It was really shocking to me and it became something I kind of enjoyed. I looked forward to pointing out to students, especially in person, you know, when I could watch their facial expressions. So what you just read, Jared, right? “Therefore, a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his,” every English translation either says wife or be joined to the something, there's a nuance or two in there. Actually, one English translation just transliterates the Hebrew without actually translating it into English because it's a bit problematic.
So, what's happening in the Hebrew there is it's actually saying, “Therefore, a man will leave his father and mother and cling to his woman, and the two will be into one flesh.” And so, in the previous verse, that's where we had this declaration, now that there are two humans, so we had one human created in verse 7 of Genesis 2, not a male, just a generic human. I always try to point it out just in case people aren't aware that there are a couple powerful redirects in the translations, right, that keep us from seeing what's going on there in the Hebrew version, at least.
So yeah, you have a human, yada, yada, try to find a partner as its equal for this human. It's not good for the human to be alone. That's what this story is trying to talk about, right? Not a specific relationship we call marriage, but it's not good to be alone, right? Very different framing there.
And then, right, the parade of animals through, none of those are suitable, thank goodness. And, right, and then, okay, now there's two. And then this declaration, this one shall be called woman, ishah, for out of ish, man, she was taken.
So you have, in 23, it's, we have the first reference to male and female. Initially, it's ha'adam, which is a generic human. Now we have, now that there are two, we have man and male and female, or man and woman. And the very next verse refers to a man and his woman. And so, when translation committees choose to refer to her as a wife, they are importing onto that verse all of what we've just been talking about in relation to other parts of the Bible or in relation to Genesis 1:28, because by the end of that verse, the two people, it's implied, right, are going to have sex. Well, then I guess we need to make sure they're married before they do that. But the Hebrew doesn't do that. It's still just a man and a woman.
And what this helped me to see and kind of take a step back and to notice is that in the Hebrew Bible, there aren't two different nouns to differentiate between woman and wife. It's just woman. It's just ishah. And the same is true of man. It's 'Ish, and that is translated as either man or husband. But it's the same noun. And the same is true in the newer testament. We have—
Angela: Right. Same thing. Aner and gune.
Jennifer G. Bird: Exactly, exactly. The aner and gune. We don't have a separate way to refer to humans, you know, before being paired up and then after the way we do today. We have lots of ways that we kind of differentiate it for person is single or engaged or paired up or married or whatever. And so for me, that became this aha moment of they were thinking about this differently than we do, and I think it's important that we honor that, that we see what that does to the way we read and understand these stories. If we just remove husband and wife language entirely from the Christian Bible and replace it with man and woman, how would that change things for you?
Jared: I think that's a perfect segue into this conversation around how marriage functions in the Hebrew Bible. So if we, if we get rid of the the language of, of husband and wife, which brings with it a lot of baggage of what we're bringing to the table and what we're assuming, not even from a maybe more conservative Christian tradition, just from a 21st century perspective of what we expect a marriage to be, can we, if we get rid of that language, maybe you can elucidate a little bit more of how the Hebrew Bible portrays marriage.
Are there a couple of stories or laws or things that, that maybe we would, it would cause us to maybe scratch our head to say, “Oh, maybe marriage was, you know, functioned differently.” And I think you've touched on it already in the centrality of sex and procreation and family lineage and all of that, and even talking about protection. But I think there's a lot more going on. So I think it would be really, I think our listeners could use a couple of ahas in that as well.
Jennifer G. Bird: Yeah. Okay. Understood. And I, one of the things I'll say, and, and I had this reaction initially as well is gosh, that makes it feel more raw or, “Ooh, I don't like that because that's kind of, that feels more objectifying.” And that's kind of the point here that I'm trying to make, right? Is that is, they are thinking about it less sacredly, less beautifully, whatever, you know, choose your language here, but they aren't, and I, it's funny because I, I have a way that I engage this topic with students online and they always want to talk about, you know, this covenant that we made and these promises we made to each other when they're, I ask them to write a letter from Sarah to Abraham after their trip to Egypt in Genesis chapter 12.
I get great imaginative ideas, but they're all coming from what they are looking forward to, you know, if they want to be married. And it's, there's no reference to people making promises to each other or commitments or being devoted or, you know, any of that.
Biblically speaking, you know, a man takes a woman, she's his property. He has sex with her to mark her as his property. And whether or not they learn to love each other is just kind of who knows, you know, like, we don't have an example of married couple in the Bible, these two people enter into it, both choosing it as equals or based on love. We don't have that in the Bible. I love that that's an ideal that many people I know try to live up to, and that's how they see their commitment, right? But that's not biblical.
You asked for a couple ahas, and I, one of the things I was thinking of is this chapter on matriarchs, patriarchs, laws, and adultery. Again, it's kind of, it was shocking to me to, to think about, going through the laws in Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy, with this lens in mind, the laws that apply to marriage in some way, so Hebrew Bible in particular was written by men, or at least mostly by men, but certainly for a male audience.
So all of the commands are as if a man is going to be listening, and there's an assumption of them being hetero. I mean, I think that's also a part of this larger conversation, but what was surprising to me was that I had to break down the laws into three or four categories. And the four categories are laws that talk about adultery, laws on specifically marriage, but in a way such as when a man seduces a virgin who's not yet engaged, this is what he's to do. He's to go ahead and take her as his own. How to handle the women and children who belong to your enslaved man. You know, so it's still kind of general, but priests must not take a prostitute or other defiled woman as his own. Priests must take only virgins, no defiled women. Those are the laws on marriage.
Then the laws on men handling their property, it looks like this. You can sell your daughter into sex slavery because she's, your daughter is your property that came out of your marriage, right? If a daughter of a priest profanes her father, he can do such and such, which is awful. So a man and his property, whether it's his woman or his daughter, is talked about, right, in these laws.
And then, the one that, again, this, it's amazing how many, like, whoa, I hadn't noticed that things came up for me in, in this research, was a lot of people like to turn to Leviticus 18 and 20 to look at that one verse, right, that talks about, you shall not lie with a male as you lie with a woman, again, directed at a man, a male audience.
But what I hadn't stopped to think about prior to this was the other 15 verses or so before or after that one are all commands about which women a man cannot have sex with. It's not even the language for marriage in the Hebrew Bible, which is a man taking. There isn't a verb to marry. There's only take.
So it's not, “Oh, you can't take this woman to be your property.” It's, “you can't touch this woman. You can't have sex with this woman.” And most of the women on that list in both Leviticus 18 and 20 are basically the women he would see at a family reunion. So we have two long lists of commands to alleged, I mean, supposedly hetero men telling them which women he can't have sex with.
So we have this implied understanding that men are having sex with other women besides the women they've claimed already. We're just giving you the boundaries for it. And it's in there twice, like these dudes needed it twice. And people want to say, this is about marriage. I'm like, it's not even about marriage. It's just about sex.
Jared: Oh no, that's, that's good. I just think it's helping people to I mean, I think for a lot of people, it's them not, it's not realizing the amount of projection we are putting onto the text.
And so even when we have the word wife, that's just a word that triggers a lot of assumptions about what a wife is and does. And we, over time, through our tradition, we get taught and retaught and reinforced only particular pieces of the biblical text that support that and we leave out maybe the broader picture of what's a relationship like that really look like in the ancient world.
Angela: Jennifer, you talk so much about property rights in your answers to our questions about your fabulous work. And as you talk about property rights, you talk about in your work about virginity and adultery. And then you've talked about the boundaries of the women that men can and cannot sleep with. And I think that's related to property rights as well.
But I had an aha moment as I was rereading your work. And one thing that you said in your chapter or section about Hosea, “we have a blueprint for abusive relationships in our biblical text.” When you think about property rights and thinking about that language of a blueprint for abusive relationships in our biblical text, is there a way that you can tie some of this language of property rights and abusive relationships to what it looks like for the idea of submissive wives that we usually hear about in the ways that wives are supposed to behave today?
Jennifer G. Bird: Um—I'm starting to get emotional because I wasn't expecting to go there. Only what I mean is, I am expecting it from you Angela because you care about this content on this level, but I hadn't emotionally prepared myself and when I start to get into that mode of really taking this very seriously, it's very disturbing to me. It's very upsetting.
Angela: Well, can I help you out with that?
Jennifer G. Bird: Well, I think it ought to be upsetting, but please go ahead and yeah.
Angela: Well no, I think for a lot of us, we read our biblical text and we know that a lot of it is life and death too.
Jennifer G. Bird: Yeah.
Angela: And it's so important what we glean from our Bible. And so it is emotional. So I just want to say I hear you and I feel you on that.
Jennifer G. Bird: Thank you. Yeah. One of the things I wanted to say back to your question though, is your question says it all in a sense. Right? You have just noted that Hosea chapter 2, and I think 1 Peter chapter 3, the first five or six verses in chapter 3, those are both showing us how dynamics play out in an abusive relationship.
And it's not always that, in a hetero, right? Because abusive relationships happen for whatever combination of humans, but you know, in a generic setting or in the setting within the biblical text, we have a husband and a wife. And in Hosea, it is God who is in the role of husband to Israel, his people.
And in Hosea chapter 2, there are threats. You know, “I'm going to do this to you. I'm going to cause you to die of thirst. I'm going to do all of these things to you. I'm going to expose you and force myself upon you sexually in front of your lovers.” Like, “And they're going to want to save you from my hand and they won't be able to. I'm going to keep you from your favorite places to go. I'm going to isolate you, all so that you will come back to me.”
I mean, it is deeply disturbing to me to try to talk about it because it is so very much the way things play out today. It does tell me, um, and I actually had an exchange with a Hebrew Bible scholar, very esteemed scholar, who's written on this a couple times. And he has come at it much more academically. And it just kind of undoes me that he says, you know, this is the best way for them to have shamed these leaders of Israel is to tell these men, leaders of Israel, that they are a woman, a bride, and they're going to be mistreated by the husband. This is the best way to get their attention.
And, you know, I'm like, Oh, okay. Okay. Okay. I'm having a hard time with this, but it's telling us a lot about the presumption of men having possession over the bodies of their women, over their lives, over their resources, over where they can go, what they can do, and what they can and can't do with their bodies.
So a patriarchal worldview that says all these things about a man and a woman that might belong to him, this is very unloving, but this is a way that that can play out. And the fact that we have it as God is that husband and doing all these horrible things, and then people are just taught to look at “I'm doing all this so we'll get back together and then we can start over and things will be great” and like, no, that happy ending A) isn't real anyway and B) does not make what you just said okay to get there. But people are taught to find a way to accommodate that from God to God's own people. So no wonder people also have a hard time seeing that as abusive. They don't want what's described in the Bible to be anything but holy and good. Ultimately, somehow, it's for your best. God just wants you back.
So it keeps us from seeing that those—he's threatening their lives. It is abuse. We need to be able to call that out as what it is and not make it okay. But a patriarchal worldview that says that women belong to the men, belong to men, this does set us up very powerfully for the abuse that you were asking me to talk about and as you're elucidating. When you tell women that they have to be submissive to their husbands as they are to the Lord, but the man doesn't have to be submissive. The man, well, the man is being told to love. That is actually a shocking revelation suggestion to make, but still they aren't equals. She is still submitting to him in everything as she does to the Lord.
So regardless of what kind of love you want to give it, some scholars have referred to this as love patriarchalism, right? “Well, at least he's being loving, but it's still his control, it's still his game. The woman is still submitting to him in everything.” And so, yes, when people, especially in faith communities, talk about husbands and wives and wives being submissive to their husbands, I do think people mean well, I do believe that.
But what we see in Hosea and 1 Peter is the culmination or a logical conclusion that you can make, you know, when men are allowed to have control over women's bodies like that, whatever kinds of frustrations they might be dishing out become justified because she's their property or however you want to look at that.
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Jared: We talk a lot on the podcast here, just about understanding the context in which these books were written. And so, understanding the context of the ancient world, which was, this wouldn't have been a shocking text in the ancient world. This is the water that everybody swam in, in that culture and in that context.
And just to, you've mentioned 1 Peter 3 a couple of times, but maybe as we wrap up our, our time, maybe we have a room for a couple of questions, but I think making that maybe even more explicit, because when you talk about these Hebrew Bible texts, we could come away with the notion that, well, those were sort of, not that this is helpful in any sense, you know, metaphorical. It's like, we didn't really carry that in, but then when you see 1 Peter 3, which, which makes it very practical and just puts it in very concrete terms, um, and ties it to that tradition, you know, where it mentions Sarah, who obeyed Abraham. It's sort of drawing back to say, like, If you want to be a part of this tradition and you want to be a part of it in the way that's faithful to God, this is part of what that means is to be submissive to your husband and, and all that that entails in this, in this culture, but can you say a little bit more of, when we get to the New Testament, um, in 1 Peter 3, how that gets continued in the text.
Jennifer G. Bird: Yes. And I will warn you that this is actually what I wrote my dissertation on. So, I will do my best to make it, pick out the highlights for sure, but that short section, it's six verses, um, it starts out by saying, “Women,” again, my English says wives and when I do live streams, I like to raise my hand when my English translation uses husband or wife, or also when it uses servant instead of slave, um, I raise my hand to say, you know, I'm reading what I think, what I know the Greek says, but my translation says something else.
So instead of opening wives, it's “Women in the same way, except the authority of your men.” Right? So that yada, yada, yada, “when they see the purity and reverence of your lives,” all kinds of layers of troubling pieces there, because the same is never said to men, right? Purity, reverence is being put on women. And it's in this larger context of controlling the women's behavior. “Do not adorn yourselves outwardly.” And so there's conversation to be had about why they would be telling women not to show off fancy hairdos and fancy clothes, right, important in context, but it's also been used and applied to women throughout their life, not just when they meet on Sunday.
And so what that ends up doing is shutting down self-expression, which is a part of an abusive relationship. “Let your adornment be the inner self with the lasting beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is very precious in God's sight.” And I'm going to tell you, this part makes me just as mad as anything else because I don't have a gentle and quiet spirit.
And so—
Angela: [Chuckling] A lot of us don't.
Jennifer G. Bird: Exactly. I didn't want to speak for you, Angela, but I kind of, you know, you'd resonate with that, right? Like, don't, you know, But that's, you know, that is a gentle and quiet spirit is a very controllable spirit, right? And then this, this comment that you, the, the part that you're referring to, Jared, but I wanted to lead up to it, right?
“That it was in this way long ago that the holy women who hoped in God used to adorn themselves.” And here's the kicker. “Thus Sarah obeyed Abraham and called him Lord. You have become her daughters as long as you,” and this is my translation, “do what is good and are not frightened by terrifying things.” Most English translations tone that down a little bit.
So the question is, when did Sarah ever call Abraham Lord? When did she ever obey him? And the only time she obeys him is when he pimps her out, right, in Egypt. And then in Genesis 20, where the narrator makes it clear that the king of Gerar does not have sex with her. But in Egypt, it's very clear, right? She's being forced to have sex with a pharaoh.
And so the context of 1 Peter, the author of 1 Peter, who was in jail in Rome at the time for being a part of this following, and he is telling women, he's referencing a time in Sarah's life when she experienced physical harm. And he's saying that you become her daughters if you play along similarly. So, I think it's a very complex situation, right? I think that the author intended, meant well, that knowing that these women are experiencing terrible things at the hands of their partners, their husbands, that they're being abused, that there's a lot of physical harm and emotional intimidation or whatever going on because we have this confusion or this, the masters of the house are part of one religious tradition and the women and enslaved peoples are often a part of Christianity, like this new sect of Judaism.
I mean, it's complicated, but people are the outsiders, others outside are perceiving people who are part of the way as politically threatening. That's a hard thing to unpack. But I guess what I'm trying to get at is, I think the author of 1 Peter was thinking long term get through this, these sufferings, get through what you're enduring for the sake of, you know, the movement or whatever. I don't think he meant for this to be 2000 years of women subjecting themselves to horrific treatment. But this passage has been used, and in particular when it says, do these “be submissive, even if some do not want to obey, they may be won over without a word by their wives conduct.” In current context and in the last several hundred years, that line, that idea that an abusive relationship can be changed or fixed by the person being abused just behaving better? Like that is not true, but it's in scripture. And so people believe that it's true because God wouldn't put something wrong in the Bible, right? That idea, right? So, it, this, this language has been used to instruct women to stay in abusive relationships.
That's just a fact, right? That that has happened to millions of women have stayed in an abusive relationship because of this line in 1 Peter 3. And so I talk about the author kind of taking on the role of being the abusive partner, saying these things to the women that keeps them confined and all these other things.
But it's stunning to me that the one time in all of Christian scripture that Sarah is held up as someone to emulate, it is when she went, in those two stories in Genesis 12 and 20 when she was, I'm sorry, I keep using this language, but it's what I use to just to help people see what's going on, when Abraham pimps her out to save his life and to get a whole lot of goods when it comes to the story in Egypt. That's the one time Sarah and her obedience is held up as something to emulate. Like, that's just frightening to me.
Angela: And I was just going to add that becomes a good passage for victim blaming.
Jennifer G. Bird: Exactly.
Angela: You've said that.
Jared: Well, as we do wrap up our time, I mean, I feel like there's just so much left to uncover and unpack and talk about.
I'm actually even, it's such a, it was such a heavy moment and it was so profound. I think that was an important piece to the puzzle. It ties it together in a helpful way. Um, but as we wrap up, how, can you maybe help make sense of, not to get too abstract here, but help people who care about the Bible—
Jennifer G. Bird: Yes.
Jared: —as you clearly still care about the Bible, when you see these things in the text and you want to respect the text. It's still an important part of the Christian tradition. I still want to read it. I want to have it in community. How do you do that with these revelations of what's in there and the culture and the context out of which the Bible was written?
Jennifer G. Bird: I have to say that I, my response, whatever the topic might be that we're turning to the Bible to discuss, I have a similar response in mind. And I'm actually reading, I hope you don't mind me doing this, but I'm actually reading from wording I put together. It's at the, it's in the final chapter of my second book, Permission Granted.
And so, I think it's relevant for this context in particular. So, I'm just going to read a little bit of it if you don't mind. “Personally, I hold my understanding of who God is and is not as my lens in every encounter with scripture. I have a litmus test for scripture and theological claims. If a biblical passage or theological doctrine endorses freedom, liberation, love, the fullness of life for all people, or a mature and responsible faith, then it is, quote, ‘of God.’ When I see a passage that depicts God as wrathful or as dealing death blows to his supposed enemies, for instance, then that passage does not pass the test. When there are passages that contain belittling words or that endorse arbitrary restrictions on people, I assume those passages were inspired by human desires, not a loving and reconciling God. Most of all, I believe in the ability of humans to make ethical, loving and moral choices. This is what binds us together. I believe that when a biblical passage does not endorse such choices, then we need to be able to call it out instead of finding a way to uphold it anyway.”
So I, my response is I have a large framework in mind, I guess, Jared, you know, reading biblical texts needs for me, I, I want a need to live ethically and lovingly supporting other people, right? All of the things. And there's much more in my present experiences and people I know and love that help me keep that in mind first. And when I engage scripture, in particular, when it comes to relationships, I know I'm going to find a lot that doesn't hold up anymore. And I'm okay with that. I haven't always been okay with that.
That was initially kind of hard for me. Right? But it's an honest way of looking at it, at least for me. And I think trying to work through that, wrestle through that for oneself, leads to a more mature faith and a more mature and better informed way of engaging the Bible. Instead of it needing to endorse something in particular, you can use it the best and the worst. You can see the best and the worst for what it is, right? And appreciate the good stuff.
Jared: Well, thank you for coming on and for kind of wrapping that up. I think that's a good takeaway for people as they're wrestling with some of this as well. So thank you for, for, first of all, being interested in all of this and for doing the work and, and for studying the text closely and being able to provide such a valuable teaching and service to people as they're wrestling with this as well. So thank you for coming on and sharing that with us.
Jennifer G. Bird: Thank you for having me.
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Outro: You've just made it through another episode of the Bible for Normal People! Don't forget you can catch our other show, Faith for Normal People, in the same feed wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was brought to you by the Bible for Normal People team: Brittany Hodge, Stephen Henning, Wesley Duckworth, Savannah Locke, Tessa Stultz, Danny Wong, Natalie Weyand, Lauren O'Connell, Jessica Shao, and Naiomi Gonzalez.
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